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Two researchers have been awarded prestigious Marie Curie grants from the European Commission for two years of research in Environmental Biology and Theoretical Physics. The  support researchers at all stages of their careers, regardless of age and nationality, with a research grant for one or two years at a European university.

The Marie Curie grants support Andrés Romanowski to work as a postdoc at the Institute of Environmental Biology, under supervision of Prof. Ronald Pierik, and Huaiyang Yuan to continue his research at the Institute for Theoretical Physics within the group of Prof. Rembert Duine.

Andrés Romanowski

The goal of my fundamental plant research is to rethink agriculture to ensure food security.

"As arable land becomes scarcer and the human population continues to grow, we need to focus our efforts on increasing yield. The goal of my fundamental plant research is to rethink agriculture to ensure food security. One way to do so is to lower yield loss due to light limitation by neighbouring shade. Interestingly, plants can only perceive this shade signal at dusk. This is controlled by the plant’s internal timing mechanism, the circadian clock. As the circadian clock helps optimise plant fitness and overall yield, I will focus on understanding how the clock helps optimise key predictors of yield when plants are shaded, such as plant fitness and biomass. Furthermore, I will translate my findings into pennycress, a recently domesticated crop important for oil, animal feed and bioproducts."

Huaiyang Yuan

To find efficient means to process big data I will examine the magnonic Schrödinger cat state and its potential applications in quantum information science.

"With the rapid accumulation of information and data in the modern society, it becomes more important and urgent to find efficient means to store and process big data. The traditional ways include the magnonic spintronics which manipulates collective excitations in magnets with low power consumption and quantum information science which utilizes the quantum nature of spins. In this project (SPINCAT), I will bridge these two fields by examining the quantum properties and transport of magnons. In particular, I will examine the generation and manipulation of magnonic Schrödinger cat state and its potential applications in quantum information science."